Instantly Free Up Almost 1GB on Your Raspberry Pi By Ditching LibreOffice and Wolfram

One of the really nice things about the newest builds of Raspbian is that it comes with just about all the software you need to get running. The downside of that is that all that software takes up a ton of space. RasPi.tv points out you can quickly snag about a 1GB back by deleting two apps: LibreOffice and Wolfram. Read more…

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Instantly Free Up Almost 1GB on Your Raspberry Pi By Ditching LibreOffice and Wolfram

Google Finds D-Wave Machine To Be 10^8 Times Faster Than Simulated Annealing

An anonymous reader sends this report form the Google Research blog on the effectiveness of D-Wave’s 2X quantum computer: We found that for problem instances involving nearly 1000 binary variables, quantum annealing significantly outperforms its classical counterpart, simulated annealing. It is more than 10^8 times faster than simulated annealing running on a single core. We also compared the quantum hardware to another algorithm called Quantum Monte Carlo. This is a method designed to emulate the behavior of quantum systems, but it runs on conventional processors. While the scaling with size between these two methods is comparable, they are again separated by a large factor sometimes as high as 10^8. A more detailed paper is available at the arXiv. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Finds D-Wave Machine To Be 10^8 Times Faster Than Simulated Annealing

Betternet is a Free, Unlimited VPN With No Registration

Windows/iOS/Android/Chrome/Firefox: A good VPN is a handy tool. A free, unlimited one is even better. Betternet aims to make using a VPN (as well as my wordplay) dead simple. Read more…

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Betternet is a Free, Unlimited VPN With No Registration

Breakthrough In LED Construction Increases Efficiency By 57 Percent

Zothecula writes: With LEDs being the preferred long-lasting, low-energy method for replacing less efficient forms of lighting, their uptake has dramatically increased over the past few years. However, despite their luminous outputs having increased steadily over that time, they still fall behind more conventional forms of lighting in terms of brightness. Researchers at Princeton University claim to have come up with a way to change all that by using nanotechnology to increase the output of organic LEDs by 57 percent. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Breakthrough In LED Construction Increases Efficiency By 57 Percent

How to Short-Stroke Your Hard Drive for Optimal Speed

Windows: If you’d like the speed of your mechanical hard drive to be closer to SSD speeds, short-stroking your hard drive is your best bet. These steps can get your hard drive up to speed at the cost of some memory. Read more…

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How to Short-Stroke Your Hard Drive for Optimal Speed

Make an Awesome First Impression With a Tetris-Playing Business Card

In a time when business cards seem more obsolete than ever , more and more people are coming up with fantastic ways to modernize them. And no one will probably make a better first impression than Kevin Bateske, who created this business-card-sized Game Boy clone called the Arduboy that’s just 1.6 millimeters thick. Read more…        

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Make an Awesome First Impression With a Tetris-Playing Business Card

The Amazing Ancient Machines of Hero of Alexandria

Two thousand ago, the Thomas Edison of the ancient world lived in Alexandria, Egypt where he tinkered, built and wrote about some of the most amazing and whimsical machines the pre-industrial world had ever seen. Read more…        

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The Amazing Ancient Machines of Hero of Alexandria